A few altcoins rustling

An overall bearish mood left Bitcoin and a bunch of other major coins sputtering to start the week. However, a few smaller-cap altcoins are flashing incongruously green.

One of them is the native token of the layer-1 Aptos blockchain. It shouldn't ever be confused with counterfeit APT originating from airdrop scam sites with names such as ClaimAPTGift.com. Indeed, just such a token temporarily halted trading of authentic APT at a major South Korean exchange after it was discovered some users were able to deposit and then cash out of the bogus APT. The incident apparently could have been worse save for a quirk of decimal point fate – and in the end actual APT fired up 8% in 24 hours as of 7:55 a.m. (EST)

Another standout performer is Chainlink which gained 1.8% in 24 hours. LINK is a shimmer of green against the glaring red slab that is CoinGecko's Top Twenty. Over the past week, Chainlink, a standard-bearer for decentralized finance (DeFi), experienced an uptick in network activity, AMBCrypto said.

Curve, another DeFi leader, gained 5.7%.

Meanwhile, Axie Infinity (gaming sector) and ImmutableX (NFTs, gaming) were among the Top 100 coins that found their way into positive territory with the former, AXS, up 4%.

The crypto world on Sunday kept a close watch on South Korea's Upbit after it suffered a security breach that allowed deposits of fake Aptos tokens. Per Coingape, the exchange immediately halted APT deposits/withdrawals, narrowly averting disaster.

For several hours yesterday, industry members held their breath while nervously doing some back-of-the-envelope math pegging the total value of the fake APT tokens at more than $3 billion. Swift action minimized losses. Trading of real APT on Upbit has since resumed.

Now today comes news of another unfortunate incident from the past weekend. Mixin, a digital asset platform based in Hong Kong, revealed that hackers on Saturday stole $200 million. Mixin said its cloud service provider was attacked.

Bitcoin volatility never materialized last week. This week commenced sloppily. But the $26K level at least held.

September, not exactly known as a kind month for crypto, has witnessed the largest digital asset surge above $27K a couple of times but bears are not having it. With BTC faffing about, several altcoins are getting a fresh look.

Momentum favors but a few. As of Sunday afternoon, XRP and Solana were the only Big Ten coins in the green on the week. Each had gained 2%-3%. But both XRP and SOL as of Monday turned flat to slightly down.

Toncoin fell out of the Big Ten, sliding 11% in seven days. Still, TON remained just below $2.20 and has surged 50% in the past 30 days.

Cointelegraph pegged a slew of charisma-endowed candidates possibly poised to lead a charge if winds shift favorably. Among this elite altcoin cadre is Arbitrum, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. At least one whale (and more than a few shrimps) have loaded up on ARB of late ahead of an Ethereum upgrade seen as boding well for layer-2 rollup projects, according to AMBCrypto.

As for BTC's outlook, bears could hold sway if $26,200 does not quickly come back into view. The down ramp to $25,750 might well contain a trap door connected to a lard-slathered chute leading to $24,800.

Bears do appear to have successfully instigated a downward move; bulls won't go quietly.

If $26K holds up, selling pressure might soon abate. Is there green in the BTC chart? We checked at 8:45 a.m. (EST). BTC was $26,097, up 0.1% in one hour.

If BTC can somehow rally to $27,000, several analysts say, it would seem $28,000 is around the corner.